keys
No keyboard is drawn on this page. A diagram you can look at is a question you never have to answer, and answering it — wrongly at first — is the only thing that puts the board in memory rather than in view.
Seven units · twenty minutes · nothing is timed on screen
Filled by how readily each key is retrieved, not how fast it is typed — in a passage you can see the letter coming. Past 500 ms it is being worked out rather than recalled.
K1—Find home blind
Hands off the keyboard, then both index fingers onto the two ridged keys at the same moment, without looking. Every location in this trainer is described as a step from home, so home has to be somewhere your hands can arrive at rather than somewhere they can find.
Six arrivals inside nine-tenths of a second, hands genuinely lifted between each.
K2—The four inner columns
The index fingers carry twelve keys — their own column and the sideways stretch beside it. Each column is named once and then walked as a round trip: home, up, home, down, home. The return is three of the five, because the return is the half beginners drop.
Four columns walked twice, with the reach returning to home every time.
K3—Index keys, cold
The same twelve keys, now with no column named and nothing on screen but the character. This is the first real test of the map: the answer has to come from memory rather than from a heading you just read.
Every one of the twelve found twice running, from cold.
K4—The six outer columns
Middle, ring and little fingers — eighteen keys in six columns. The ring and little fingers are the weakest and least independent, so these sweeps will feel worse than the last set. That is anatomy, not failure; the map does not care which finger is clumsy.
Six columns walked twice, hand staying anchored while one finger moves.
K5—Outer keys, cold
Eighteen keys, blind and interleaved. Interleaving scores worse in the moment than working one column at a time, and retains substantially better — which is why nothing here shows you a speed while you are doing it.
Every one of the eighteen found twice running, from cold.
K6—Name the movement
The map read the other way round. You are given a finger and a direction — left ring, one down — and you press the key it lands on. A map that only works from character to position is half a map, and it is the half that fails when you are typing a word you have never typed before.
Thirty movements answered from the description alone.
K7—The whole board, cold
All thirty keys, blind, in an order chosen to keep neither hand nor finger predictable. Nothing new is taught here. It is the transfer test: what survives when the columns are not grouped and there is no heading to lean on.
Thirty keys, each found twice running, with no column to lean on.
THE MAP—Ten columns, one per finger
assumed US QWERTYThirty positions is a lot to memorise. Ten short strings is not, and they are the same information — one finger per column, its middle letter already under that finger. Read it once, then let the drills do the work.
The two stretch columns are the ones almost everyone gets wrong. Their home key is itself a sideways reach, which makes every key in them a two-part movement — and it is why B belongs to the left index finger and N to the right, however unnatural that feels the first hundred times.